Taking a shower rather than a bath to save water? It might just be money down the drain

A new study has found some modern
showers waste so much water, their owners would be better off filling up the bath tub.

For years it was the mantra of every eco-warrior, consumer guru and politician keen to jump on the green band- wagon — showers are better than baths.

But research into the habits of 100 families has found that power showers use twice as much energy and hot water as a bath.

Baths okay: After years of baths getting a bad rap it turns out a dip in the tub uses half as much water as some power showers

Even an ordinary shower eight minutes long is nearly as wasteful as a bath, the soap giant Unilever claims.

The findings don’t just challenge the misconception that showers are always eco-friendly, they also highlight the extraordinary amount of clean drinking water that goes down the plughole or round the U-bend.

According to the study, a typical Briton consumes 150 litres, or 33 gallons, of fresh water every day on everything from our morning ablutions to watering the garden and washing clothes.

Every dribble of that total — equivalent to two baths of water for every person — has been filtered, treated and chlorinated to make it safe to consume.

But this is all a drop in the ocean compared with the hidden or ‘embedded’ water used to produce our food, clothes and household goods — equivalent to 3,300 litres or 725 gallons for each of us every day.

Our water use has been going up since the Thirties, fuelled by labour-saving gadgets and lifestyles.

‘People are living in smaller families and there are more single people living on their own,’ says Jacob Tompkins, managing director of Waterwise, a group that campaigns against water waste.

‘People used to wash their clothes once a week, now they use their washing machines every day. We used to have baths once a week, now we have showers every day. And we are living more and more in the driest parts of England, Wales and Scotland.’

The UK gets through more water per person than most of our continental neighbours.

Germany and the Netherlands use 125 litres per person each day, the French 110 litres and in parts of Denmark only 80 litres.

The average UK water and sewerage bill is £356, says regulator Ofwat. Waterwise says consumption is so high in Britain because only 40 per cent of homes have meters. In countries with lower water use, meters are more common and prices are higher.

Many have also introduced water efficiency measures such as rainwater harvesting on new buildings and non-drip taps.

So where do our 150 litres go?

DOWN THE LOONearly a third of the drinking water piped into our homes goes straight into the sewer. Britain’s 45 million lavatories flush away two billion litres of water every day. More than seven million are the old-fashioned type that release more than 13 litres in one go.

According to Waterwise, the typical household flushes a loo 5,000 times a year.

You can use a free gadget called a ‘hippo’ which sits inside the cistern and makes the lavatory use less water. Or a £12 kit will convert a normal lavatory into a dual flush one.

Cold spell: Many people think that taking a shower is the best way of saving water and energy - new research shows this may not be true.

BATHS AND SINKSBathing,
washing and teeth cleaning uses up 21 per cent of a household’s water. A
running tap spews out six litres of water a minute.

A
bath can hold 80 litres, while a conventional electric shower uses 62
litres of hot water in a typical eight-minute ablution and costs around
30p for water and electricity.

But power showers are a different story.

POWER SHOWERSShowering
gets through 12 per cent of a Briton’s daily water. But an eight-minute
power shower drinks up around 136 litres of hot water — more than the
average Frenchman uses in a whole day.

The
fastest power shower recorded by the Unilever study used as much water
as a bath in just four minutes and 42 seconds — or 63p a shower.

Modern power showers are, however, now often fitted with regulators or aerators to reduce waste.

WASHING CLOTHESWashing machines once used 150 litres a wash. But huge technological advances in the past two decades mean that modern machines now use 50 litres.

Clothes-washing accounts for around 15 per cent of the water we consume in homes. Water experts say most people under-fill their machines with clothes — and some ‘half load’ settings use as much water as a full load.

WASHING UPWashing the dishes makes up eight per cent of our daily water.

A fully-loaded modern dishwasher uses less energy and water than washing by hand.

Without a dishwasher, the most efficient method is with two bowls — one with soapy water, another with clean.

Leaving taps running to rinse off suds is an environmental disaster.

Fill em up: A bath tub can hold up to 80 litres of water

GARDENSWatering plants, lawns and filling paddling pools uses seven per cent of the average person’s water consumption, spread across a year.

On hot days, outdoor water makes up half of our daily consumption.Gardeners who water their lawns may be doing more harm than good.

Grass is designed to survive drought and becomes vulnerable to water shortages when regularly hosed.

DRINKINGJust four per cent of the tap water used in a day is intended to be drunk.

But far less than that actually gets to our mouths.

Waterwise estimates that waiting for a tap to run cold to pour a drink uses ten litres of water, while more is wasted in over-filled kettles and saucepans boiling without lids.

‘VIRTUAL’ WATERWhile the water that gushes from the taps is the most visible use of water, it isn’t the largest.

If you include the water used to produce food, clothes, paper, household goods, electricity and cars, then the typical person uses a staggering 3,300 litres of water a day.

Much of that water — known as ‘embedded’ or ‘virtual’ water, because it is used to create something else, — is ‘imported’ to the UK in the form of these various products.

Some of the figures are staggering. For example it takes around 170 litres of fresh water to make one pint of beer, 13 litres to grow one tomato and 200 litres to create one pint of milk, around 2,000 litres of water to grow one kilogram of rice and 2,400 litres of water to produce the animal feed and sustain the cattle needed for one hamburger.

A cotton T-shirt took around 4,000 litres of water to make, while a pair of jeans used 11,000 litres. A disposable nappy needed around 800 litres.

Embedded water is notoriously hard to estimate, and the figures are only a crude approximation.

Critics say it treats all water — whether it fell naturally as rain or has been treated by the water companies — the same.

‘Not only are people unaware of the amount of water they use in day- to-day life that they can see, they are also not aware of the invisible water that is present in every product they use from bread to socks,’ says Jacob Tompkins.

‘Whether its water from taps or embedded water, people need to be aware.’